In current information technology (IT) infrastructures, servers of all capacities have unused resource headroom while running single applications. Each of the servers has associated ongoing management costs and software licensing costs that outweigh the initial, one-time investment for hardware. Typically the servers were initially deployed to handle additional growth or with little planning as to resource capacity. In any case, the servers often use only a small percentage of computing resources. For each server, a cost is attached to the unused capacity.
Workload management controllers implement tools for consolidating applications, thereby improving business value delivered to attain increased returns on server investments.